Seedlings

We’ve started planning our vegetable/herb/flower garden for this year, and we’ve already made some progress on getting better at the whole process. Last year, we basically just dug up a pretty large plot in our yard and filled it with plants that we bought from Menards and Lowe’s. We had a particularly wet growing season, and ended up with a moderately bad case of blight in our tomato section. NPR says that blight was widespread last year, both because of the excessive rain and because so many people purchased their plants from the big box stores, which allowed a ton of diseased plants to be spread all across the country.

We weren’t going to be so naive this year, so we ended up ordering heirloom seeds from Baker Creek Seed Company, a business specializing in heirloom seeds out of Missouri. We definitely wanted to go heirloom, since we’re not into Frankenfoods and we like doing things the old-fashioned way.

We ended up ordering a metric ton of seeds (after teasing our friend JoAnn about the amount she wanted, we ordered at least 25% MORE than she did), and last weekend we embarked on the process of sprouting the little bastards. We had no idea what we were doing, but we went to Menards and bought a bunch of setups for growing seedlings, including peat pellets and little biodegradable pots, and we got to work winging it. It’s less than a full week later, and as you can see, we’ve already got growth!